Jim McDermott

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, those elected to serve in the people's House sometimes must decide matters of war and peace, in other words, matters of life and death, and nothing is more important. Today we stand at the crossroads of one such momentous decision, and let no one doubt that the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians hang in the balance. This is a vote of conscience and one of the most important votes I will ever cast in the House of Representatives. I wish we were debating the language of the 1970 McGovern-Hatfield amendment. It called for directing funds only for the safe and orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Indochina. I enter into the Record at this point the Iraq version of the McGovern-Hatfield that I want to offer. Proposed McDermott Amendment to H.R. 1591, Modeled on McGovern-Hatfield After April 30, 2007, funds herein appropriated may be expended in connection with the activities of American Armed Forces in or over Iraq, Iran or Syria bordering Iraq only to accomplish the following objectives: (1) the orderly termination of military operations and the safe and systematic withdrawal of remaining armed forces by December 31, 2007 and (2) provision of humanitarian and reconstruction assistance to the people of Iraq.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, probably I knew Jack better than most in our delegation, because I did serve with him for a long time in the Washington State Legislature. And although most Members would know me as somewhat liberal and Jack as being somewhat conservative, we were really good friends, because Jack was the kind of person you could sit down and talk to, and no matter what your political views were, he would sit and talk about whatever it was on your mind. He told me a lot about his decisions to run for both the legislature and for the U.S. Senate, and he told me about how his first campaign worked. Jack went out and planted a whole field full of pumpkins, and he took an instrument that was like a cookie cutter and had it made in his name, Jack Metcalf. He took all these pumpkins when they were small and scored them on the outside, and as the pumpkins grew, the name ``Metcalf'' appeared on the pumpkins. So by the time of the election, Jack went around and gave a pumpkin to every house in his district. That is Jack Metcalf. That is the guy that was here, very unassuming, no airs about him whatsoever. He was a solid conservative, don't have any doubt about that, and he stuck to his principles. He was the kind of conservative you could talk to and find out what he thought. He would tell you exactly where he was, and that is where he was. You could try to convince him, and maybe it would work. I had one experience with Jack which I have to tell about. I was the ways and means chairman of the State senate when Jack was there in the minority, and I had a bill that I needed an extra vote on. I needed somebody in the Republican Party. So I went over and I talked to Jack about it. He listened to me and acknowledged that maybe that wasn't such a bad idea. But he was really concerned about the economic situation of the United States, and he really thought that we ought to be on the gold standard. So Jack and I had this long discussion about the gold standard, and I said, ``You know, Jack, we ought to have a hearing in the State senate on the gold standard.'' Well, as you might guess, this would have been about 1983, the gold standard wasn't exactly very high on most people's agenda, but we had a hearing, and we listened and we talked and we asked the questions and had a great long discussion about this issue, and a few days later, when I needed a vote, Jack was there. That is the kind of person he was. He was somebody who would listen to you, he would tell you what he was concerned about; and if you listened to him, you made a friend, and you were able to work with him. His wife and kids, I know, perhaps tonight are watching. You should have nothing but pride for your father and your husband. They list all the bills that he got involved in. Jack was a very, very dedicated environmentalist and did many things here. But what will always remain will be he was a guy who came here and said, I believe in term limits; he served 6 years, and he left. No fuss, no muss. He didn't ask anybody. He had made a commitment to his people in 1994 that he would leave, and he did surely as soon as the time came. So we will miss Jack. He is the kind of person that makes this place a really humane place. Jack I don't think had an enemy in this place, because, as Norm says, even if he was going to say something against you, he would either before or after come and talk to you about it and say, ``I didn't mean that personally, but I just think you are wrong on that matter.'' He had that way, and we would do well to have that spirit come back to this House. We will miss you, Jack.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, yesterday the White House said that political strategist Karl Rove and former appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court Harriet Miers would be made available to the Senate for an interview regarding the growing U.S. Attorneys scandal. However, the White House refused to allow them to testify under oath or in public. Is the White House serious? Do they honestly believe this Congress will allow them to get away with this? It would be one thing if the Bush administration had been completely honest with the Congress over the last month, but every day there are new details that completely contradict what was said the day before. Last month, Attorney General Gonzales said there was no coordination between the Justice Department and the White House in the firing of the eight U.S. Attorneys. But we now know that Karl Rove and Harriet Miers were involved from the very beginning. The administration has stalled and deceived at every step during this investigation. With that track record, why should this administration believe the Congress would agree to unacceptable secret testimony without being under oath?

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, you don't negotiate with the barrel of a gun, but that seems to be the President's strategy with respect to Iran. That is why the House must legislate to ensure that the President cannot unilaterally start another war in the Middle East, this time with Iran. The President has lost all credibility, and the world worries that another war will be waged in Iran in the name of regime change. It has been over a quarter of a century since the U.S. tried constructive engagement instead of destructive isolationism in dealing with Iran. Foreign policy under this President has played a role in pushing Iran's leaders to the fringe. The Iranian President appears intransigent and willing to use strident rhetoric to drive a wedge between the United States and other nations. What is our response? Showdown and confrontation are the diplomatic skills of this White House, a repeat of the spin cycle to foment a march to war against Iraq. Today it is economic sanctions against Iran, but what about tomorrow? Presidential advisers like the Vice President continue to encourage a policy of aggression. The President says one thing, but the Vice President says all options are on the table. The Secretary of State says one thing, but then we read what is going on behind the scenes from an investigative reporter, Seymour Hersch. The world is weary over the war in Iraq, and the world is worried about the President's intentions regarding Iran. The other day the Asia Times raised these concerns in the section entitled ``Dispatches From America.'' The Times published an article by Tom Engelhardt called ``A Bombshell That Nobody Heard,'' and I will enter it in the Record. The article considers the troubling information revealed by Seymour Hersch, especially the disclosure of U.S. military planning for a first strike capability targeting Iran, and ready to go on one day's notice. Despite official denials, we see and hear the Vice President chill the world by saying a military option against Iran has not been ruled out. Having seen it before in this administration, one troubling thought comes to mind: Bullets and bluster are more likely to produce bloodshed than peace. That is why the House must exert its constitutional duty when it comes to the President's intentions with respect to Iran. We have got to chart a new course in the Middle East, and it has to be based on a commitment to stop the bloodshed, not guarantee the flow of oil. And we cannot hope to achieve peace or stability in Iraq or Iran without addressing the Palestinian-Israeli issue openly, honestly and urgently. The issues of the Middle East are inextricably interconnected, and no one understands that better than Speaker Pelosi. At a time when the White House prefers to choose sides, our distinguished leader prefers to pursue peace in the Middle East, demanding diplomacy aimed at achieving peace through social and economic justice for all. It is the kind of vision the whole world has passionately embraced before when the world believed the United States could stand taller than any problem and person in the region. So one has to wonder, what were they thinking the other day when some Members of AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, rudely booed during a keynote address as the Speaker spoke very plainly on this issue. She said the Iraq war has not made America safer, has not made Israel safer, and has not made peace in the Middle East much easier to achieve. That is the truth. What is wrong with speaking the truth? Leaders speak the truth because they have a deep and abiding faith in the strength of people everywhere to see the truth for what it is and to use it to lay a foundation to build a better world. Today, America has a Democratic leader willing to see the world as it is, but unwilling to leave it that way. These are difficult times and we face difficult decisions just ahead. We need a strong commitment to get our soldiers out of Iraq and the strength to prevent another military misadventure in Iran. The path to peace should be littered with pages and pages of negotiation, not booby trapped by inflammatory rhetoric and people unwilling to listen. Madam Speaker, I include for the Record the materials referred to earlier [From the Asia Times: Dispatches From America] A Bombshell That Nobody Heard (By Tom Engelhardt) Let me see if I've got this straight. Perhaps two years ago, an ``informal'' meeting of ``veterans'' of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal--holding positions in the Bush administration--was convened by Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams. Discussed were the ``lessons learned'' from that labyrinthine, secret and illegal arms- for-money-for-arms deal involving the Israelis, the Iranians, the Saudis, and the Contras of Nicaragua, among others--and meant to evade the Boland Amendment, a congressionally passed attempt to outlaw US administration assistance to the anti- communist Contras. In terms of getting around Congress, the Iran-Contra vets concluded, the complex operation had been a success--and would have worked far better if the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the military had been kept out of the loop and the whole thing had been run out of the vice president's office. Subsequently, some of those conspirators, once again with the financial support and help of the Saudis (and probably the Israelis and the British), began running a similar operation, aimed at avoiding congressional scrutiny or public accountability of any sort, out of Vice President Dick Cheney's office. They dipped into ``black pools of money'', possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil dollars that have never been accounted for since the US occupation began. Some of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently funneled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadist groups (``some sympathetic to al-Qaeda'') whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. All of this was being done as part of a ``sea change'' in the Bush administration's Middle East policies aimed at rallying friendly Sunni regimes against Shi'ite Iran, as well as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Syrian government--and launching secret operations to undermine, roll back or destroy all of the above. Despite the fact that the administration of President George W. Bush is officia1ly at war with Sunni extremism in Iraq (and in the more general ``global war on terror''), despite its support for the largely Shi'ite government, allied to Iran, that it has brought to power in Iraq, and despite its dislike for the Sunni-Shiite civil war in that country, some of its top officia1s may be covertly encouraging a far greater Sunni-Shi'ite rift in the region. Imagine. All this and much more was revealed, often in remarkable detail, just over a week ago in ``The redirection'', a Seymour Hersh piece in The New Yorker. Other revelations included news of US military border crossings into Iran, new preparations that would allow Bush to order a massive air attack on that land with only 24 hours' notice, and a brief window this spring when the staggering power of four US aircraft-carrier battle groups might be available to Bush in the Persian Gulf. Hersh, the man who first broke the My Lai story in the Vietnam era, has never been off his game since. In recent years, from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal on, he has consistently released explosive news about the plans and acts of the Bush administration. Imagine, in addition, that Hersh went on Democracy Now!, Fresh Air, Hardball with Chris Matthews and CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer and actually elaborated on these claims and revelations, some of which, on the face of it, seem like potentially illegal and impeachable offenses, if they do indeed reach up to the vice president or president. Now imagine the response: front-page headlines; editorials nationwide calling for answers, congressional hearings, or even the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into some of the claims; a raft of op-ed-page pieces by the nation's leading columnists asking questions, demanding answers, reminding us of the history of Iran-Contra; bold reporters from recently freed media standing up in White House and Defense Department press briefings to demand more information on Hersh's various charges; calls in Congress for hearings and investigations into why the people's representatives were left so totally out of this loop. Uh . . . All I can say is: if any of this happened, I haven't been able to discover it. As far as I can tell, no one in the mainstream even blinked on the Iran-Contra angle or the possibility that a vast, secret Middle Eastern operation is being run, possibly illegally and based on stolen funds and Saudi money, out of the US vice president's office. You can certainly find a few pieces on, or reports about, ``The redirection''--all focused only on the possible buildup to a war with Iran--and the odd wire-service mention of it; but nothing major, nothing earth-shaking or eye-popping; not, in fact, a single obvious editorial or op-ed piece in the mainstream; no journalistic questions publicly asked of the administration; no congressional cries of horror; no calls anywhere for investigations or hearings on any of Hersh's revelations, not even an expression of fear somewhere that we might be seeing Iran-Contra, the sequel, in our own moment. This, it seems to me, adds up to a remarkable non-response to claims that, if true, should gravely concern Congress, the media and the nation. Let's grant that Hersh's New Yorker pieces generally arrive unsourced and filled with anonymous officials (``a former senior intelligence official'', ``a US government consultant with close ties to Israel''). Nonetheless, Hersh has long mined his sources in the intelligence community and the military to striking effect. Undoubtedly, the lack of sourcing makes it harder for other reporters to follow up, though when it comes to such papers as the Washington Post and the New York Times, you would think that they might have Washington sources of their own to query on Hersh's claims. And, of course, editorial pages, columnists, op-ed editors, congressional representatives and reporters at administration news briefings don't need to do any footwork at all to raise these subjects. (Consider, for instance, the White House press briefing last April 10, where a reporter did indeed ask a question based on an earlier Hersh New Yorker piece.) As far as I can tell, there haven't even been denunciations of Hersh's report or suggestions anywhere that it is inaccurate or off-base. Just the equivalent of a giant, collective shrug of the U.S. media's rather scrawny shoulders. Since the response to Hersh's remarkable piece has been so tepid in places where it should count, let me take up just a few of the many issues his report raises. ``Meddling'' in Iran For at least a month, the U.S. press and television news have been full to the brim with mile-high headlines and top- of-the-news stories recounting (and, more rarely, disputing) Bush administration claims of Iranian ``interference'' or ``meddling'' in Iraq (where U.S. military spokesmen regularly refer to the Iraqi insurgents they are fighting as ``anti- Iraq forces''). Since Hersh published ``Plan B'' in The New Yorker in June 2004 in which he claimed that the Israelis were ``running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria'', he has been on the other side of this story. In ``The coming wars'' in January 2005, he first reported that the Bush administration, like the Israelis, had been ``conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since'' the summer of 2004. Last April in ``The Iran plans'', he reported that the administration was eager to put the ``nuclear option'' on the table in any future air assault on Iranian nuclear facilities (and that some in the Pentagon, fiercely opposed, had at least temporarily thwarted planning for the possible use of nuclear bunker-busters in Iran). He also reported that U.S. combat units were ``on the ground'' in Iran, marking targets for any future air attack, and quoted an unnamed source as claiming that they were also ``working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Balochis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. `The troops are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,' the consultant said. One goal is to get `eyes on the ground' . . . The broader aim, the consultant said, is to `encourage ethnic tensions' and undermine the regime.'' In ``The redirection'', he now claims that in search of Iranian rollback and possible regime change, ``American military and special-operations teams have escalated their activities in Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a Pentagon consultant on terrorism and the former senior intelligence official, have also crossed the [Iranian] border in pursuit of Iranian operatives from Iraq.'' In his Democracy Now! radio interview, he added: ``We have been deeply involved with Azeris and Balochis and Iranian Kurds in terror activities inside the country . . . and, of course, the Israelis have been involved in a lot of that through Kurdistan . . . Iran has been having sort of a series of back-door fights, the Iranian government, because . . . they have a significant minority population. Not everybody there is a Persian. If you add up the Azeris and Balochis and Kurds, you're really 30-some [%], maybe even 40% of the country.'' In addition, he reported that ``a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the president, within 24 hours'' and that its ``new assignment'' was to identify not just nuclear facilities and possible regime- change targets, but ``targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq''. Were there nothing else in Hersh's most recent piece, all of this would still have been significant news--if we didn't happen to live on a one-way imperial planet in which Iranian ``interference'' in (American) Iraq is an outrage, but secret U.S. operations in, and military plans to devastate, Iran are your basic ho-hum issue. America's mainstream news purveyors don't generally consider the issue of the United States' ``interference'' in Iran worthy of a great deal of reporting, nor do U.S. pundits consider it a topic worthy of speculation or consideration; nor, in a Congress where leading Democrats have regularly outflanked the Bush administration in hawkish positions on Iran, is this likely to be much of an issue. You can read abroad about rumored U.S. operations out of Pakistan and Afghanistan aimed at unsettling Iranian minorities such as the Balochs and about possible operations to create strife among Arab minorities in southern Iran near the Iraqi border--the Iranians seem to blame the British, whose troops are in southern Iraq, for some of this (a charge vociferously denied by the British Embassy in Tehran)--but it's not a topic of great interest in the U.S. In recent months, in fact, several bombs have gone off in minority regions of Iran. These explosions have been reported in the U.S., but you would be hard-pressed to find out what the Iranians had to say about them, and the possibility that any of these might prove part of a U.S. (or Anglo-American) covert campaign to destabilize the Iranian fundamentalist regime basically doesn't concern the news mind, even though history says it should. After all, many of the United States' present Middle Eastern problems can be indirectly traced back to the successful CIA-British-intelligence plot in 1953 to oust prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh (who had nationalized the Iranian oil industry) and install young Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in power as shah. After all, in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, the CIA (with the eager connivance of the Pakistanis and the Saudis) helped organize, arm and fund the Islamic extremists who would some day turn on the U.S. for terror campaigns on a major scale. As Steve Coll reported in his superb book Ghost Wars, for instance, ``Under ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence] direction, the mujahideen received training and malleable explosives to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders. [CIA director William] Casey endorsed these despite the qualms of some CIA career officers.'' Similarly, in the early 1990s, the Iraq National Accord, an organization run by the CIA's Iraqi exile of choice, Iyad Allawi, evidently planted, under the agency's direction, car bombs and explosive devices in Baghdad (including in a movie theater) in a fruitless attempt to destabilize Saddam Hussein's regime. The New York Times reported this on its front page in June 2004 (to no effect whatsoever), when Allawi was the prime minister of U.S.-occupied Iraq. Who knows where the funding, training and equipment for the bombings in Iran are coming from--but, at a moment when charges that the Iranians are sending into Iraq advanced improvised explosive devices, or the means to produce them, are the rage, it seems a germane subject. In the U.S., it's a no-brainer that the Iranians have no right whatsoever to put their people, overtly or covertly, into neighboring Iraq, a country that, back in the 1980s, invaded Iran and fought a bitter eight-year war with it, resulting in perhaps a million casualties; but it's just normal behavior for the Pentagon to have traveled halfway across the planet to dominate the Iraqi military, garrison Iraq with a string of vast permanent bases, build the largest embassy on the planet in Baghdad's Green Zone, and send special-operations teams (and undoubtedly CIA teams as well) across the Iranian border, or to insert them in Iran to do ``reconnaissance'' or even to foment unrest among its minorities. This is the definition of an imperial world view. Sleepless nights Let's leave Iran now and briefly take up a couple of other matters highlighted in ``The redirection'' that certainly should have raised the odd red flag and pushed the odd alarm button in the U.S. far more than his Iranian news (which did at least get some attention). Iran-Contra redux: Does it raise no eyebrows that, under the leadership of Elliott Abrams (who in the Iran-Contra period pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress and was later pardoned), such a meeting was held? Does no one want to confirm that this happened? Does no one want to know who attended? Iran-Contra alumni in the Bush administration at one time or another included the late president Ronald Reagan's national security adviser John Poindexter, Otto Reich, John Negroponte (who, Hersh claims, recently left his post as director of national intelligence to avoid the 21st-century version of Iran-Contra--``No way. I'm not going down that road again, with the NSC [National Security Council] running operations off the books, with no [presidential] finding''), Roger Noriega, and Robert Gates. Did the vice president or president sit in? Was either of them informed about the ``lessons drawn''? Were the vice president's right-hand men, I. Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby and/or David Addington, in any way involved? Who knows? In the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan administration drew together the seediest collection of freelance arms dealers, intelligence agents, allies and--in the case of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Iranian regime-- sworn enemies in what can only be called ``amateur hour'' at the White House. Now, it looks as if the Bush administration is heading down a similar path and, given its previous ``amateur hour'' reputation in foreign policy, imagine what this is likely to mean. Jihadis as proxies: Using jihadis as U.S. proxies in a struggle to roll back Iran--with the help of the Saudis-- should have rung a few bells somewhere in U.S. memory as another been-there, done-that moment. In the 1980s--on the theory that my enemy's enemy is my friend--the fundamentalist Catholic CIA director William Casey came to believe that Islamic fundamentalists could prove tight and trustworthy allies in rolling back the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, as a result, the CIA, backed by the Saudi royals, who themselves represented an extremist form of Sunni Islam, regularly favored and funded the most extreme of the mujahideen ready to fight the Soviets. Who can forget the results? Today, according to Hersh, the Saudis are reassuring key figures in the Bush administration that this time they have the jihadis to whom funds are flowing under control. No problem. If you believe that, you'll believe anything. Congress in the dark: Hersh claims that, with the help of Saudi National Security Adviser Prince Bandar bin Sultan (buddy to the Bushes and Cheney's close comrade-in-arms), the people running the black-ops programs out of Cheney's office have managed to run circles around any possibility of congressional oversight, leaving the institution completely ``in the dark'', which is undoubtedly exactly where Congress wanted to be for the past six years. Is this still true? The non-reaction to the Hersh piece isn't exactly encouraging. To summarize, if Hersh is to be believed--and as a major journalistic figure for the past near-40 years he certainly deserves to be taken seriously--the Bush administration seems to be repeating the worst mistakes of the Reagan administration and of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which led inexorably to the greatest acts of blowback in U.S. history. Given what we already know about the Bush administration, Americans should be up nights worrying about what all this means now as well as down the line. For Congress, the media and Americans in general, this report should have been not just a wake-up call, but a shout for an allnighter with NoDoz. In my childhood, one of the Philadelphia papers regularly ran cartoon ads for itself in which some poor soul in a perilous situation--say, clinging to the ledge of a tall building--would be screaming for help, while passers-by were so engrossed in the paper that they didn't even look up. Now, we have the opposite situation: a journalist in essence writing bloody murder in a giant media and governmental crowd. In this case, no one in the mainstream evidently cares--not yet, anyway--to pay the slightest attention. It seems that there's a crime going on and no one gives a damn.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Chairman, I proudly stand today in support of H.R. 800, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would enable workers to finally reclaim their right to freely form a union and bargain with their employers. It is clear that too many American workers today are under the threat of discrimination, harassment, or termination for simply choosing to bargain collectively for better wages, hours, and working conditions. The current system for forming unions and bargaining is broken, and it is our responsibility to fix it. This bipartisan legislation is an important first step towards leveling the playing field for workers and employers, rebuilding our middle class, improving our economy, and on a larger scale ensuring that more Americans benefit from a growing economy. Today we can set an example for the rest of the world. How can our nation continue to encourage other nations to protect their workers' rights if we do not remedy our own? Critics of this bill simply want to preserve the status quo. That is not a reasonable solution, and these critics clearly do not have our middle class workers' best interests in mind. Research shows that nearly 60 million would form a union tomorrow if given the chance, and that democratic votes would still take place under the Employee Free Choice Act. The bill before us has three major components that would help restore middle class workers' rights to designate and certify bargaining representation, to receive mediation and arbitration concerning a first contract, and to enforce stronger penalties for employee violations. I believe this is the first step towards treating the problems of income inequality, and income immobility that currently confront our nation. Today, the House of Representatives has an opportunity to send hardworking Americans a message. A message that we recognize the fundamental right to organize is essential to maintaining a just economy and a society that values work. Let us send that message loud and clear, by voting in support of H.R. 800.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the American people are concerned and the world is very uneasy. Congress must begin to restore what the President and Vice President have shattered: our credibility in the world. Headlines in the U.S. and international news media remove all doubt how the U.S. is viewed today in the world. One said: ``Russian official warns U.S. not to attack Iran.'' ``Use of force on Iran unacceptable,'' says France. ``Trigger-happy U.S. worries Putin.'' The BBC reports that the U.S. Central Command officials have already chosen an extensive list for missile and bomb attacks inside Iran. Another in the Asia Times: ``Three reasons why we should attack Iran,'' and all this comes from yesterday's headlines. The French Foreign Ministry told an Asia news agency that France believes that the use of force to solve the Iranian nuclear issue is both unimaginable and unacceptable; but not in this White House. When the Vice President announced recently that all options are still on the table, our international credibility took another direct hit. We cannot afford that kind of warmongering rhetoric any more, not in dollars, not in soldiers, not in insecurity, and not in international standing. It sounds like 2002 all over again. Like Yogi Berra said, ``deja vu all over again.'' That is a cause for grave concern on this floor and needs congressional action. We must include language in every military appropriation bill that specifically prohibits the administration from unilaterally waging war in Iran except by a vote of the Congress. As it stands, the President and the Vice President are using the same speeches from 2002. They are just replacing the name of the country, Iraq, with Iran; but this time, the world has noticed. The French foreign minister tells his boss before a television audience: ``Predictions that U.S. strikes will be conducted against Iran have become more common, and this causes concern.'' In the Baltimore Chronicle, Robert Perry writes: ``A number of U.S. military leaders, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have waged an extraordinary behind-the-scenes resistance to what they fear is a secret plan by George Bush to wage war against Iran.'' The BBC reports that two ``triggers,'' or pretexts, for a U.S. attack have already been chosen. Seymour Hersch writes in The New Yorker that the Pentagon has been ordered by the White House to plan a bombing campaign against Iran ready to go on a day's notice. Michael Klare writing in the Asia Times says that recent remarks by the President seek to instill the same fear as the run-up to the Iraq war. Listen to the President's rhetoric: ``stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges.'' Then there was the line by the President the other day: ``We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East.'' And then the President said: ``It is also clear that we face an escalating danger from Shiite extremists who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East.'' He is making a bogey-man out of Iran. People and nations listen to that inflammatory rhetoric from our President and Vice President and worry about a world careening towards another war. There is no doubt that America needs a thoughtful and coherent foreign policy concerning Iran. We ought to talk to them, for starters. We don't need to merely change the rhetoric of the White House. We need to change the administration's perilous world view that America can and will just shoot its way to peace anywhere there is a problem in the world. The first step in restoring America's credibility and global leadership is to let the world know that Congress is a coequal branch of government that will exercise its constitutional duty to ensure that the administration does not run off on its own to go to war. We have to declare that the days of runaway rhetoric by the administration are over. But let us go beyond that. Let Congress take the administration's threat of war off the table and replace it with America's true belief that we view war as unimaginable and unacceptable. Three U.S. Reasons To Attack Iran (By Michael T. Klare) Some time this spring or summer, barring an unexpected turnaround by Tehran, US President George W Bush is likely to go on national television and announce that he has ordered US ships and aircraft to strike at military targets inside Iran. We must still sit through several months of soap opera at the United Nations in New York and assorted foreign capitals before this comes to pass, and it is always possible that a diplomatic breakthrough will occur--let it be so!--but I am convinced that Bush has already decided an attack is his only option and the rest is a charade he must go through to satisfy his European allies. The proof of this, I believe, lies half-hidden in recent public statements of his, which, if pieced together, provide a casus belli, or formal list of justifications, for going to war. Three of his statements, in particular, contained the essence of this justification: his January 10 televised speech on his plan for a troop ``surge'' in Iraq, his State of the Union address of January 23, and his first televised press conference of the year on February 14. None of these was primarily focused on Iran, but Bush used each of them to warn of the extraordinary dangers that country poses to the United States and to hint at severe US reprisals if the Iranians did not desist from ``harming US troops''. In each, moreover, he laid out various parts of the overall argument he will certainly use to justify an attack on Iran. String these together in one place and you can almost anticipate what Bush's speechwriters will concoct before he addresses the American people from the Oval Office some time this year. Think of them as talking points for the next war. The first of these revealing statements was Bush's January 10 televised address on Iraq. This speech was supposedly intended to rally public and congressional support behind his plan to send 21,500 additional US troops into the Iraqi capital and al-Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni Insurgency. But his presentation that night was so uninspired, so lacking in conviction, that--according to media commentary and polling data--few, if any, Americans were persuaded by his arguments. Only once that evening did Bush visibly come alive: when he spoke about the threat to Iraq supposedly posed by Iran. ``Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges,'' he declared, which meant, he assured his audience, addressing the problem of Iran. That country, he asserted, ``is providing material support for attacks on American troops''. (This support was later identified as advanced improvised explosive devices--IEDs or roadside bombs--given to anti-American Shi'ite militias.) Then followed an unambiguous warning: ``We will disrupt the attacks on our forces . . . And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.'' Consider this Item 1 in his casus belli: because Iran is aiding and abetting the United States' enemies in Iraq, the US is justified in attacking Iran as a matter of self- defense. Bush put it this way in an interview with Juan Williams of National Public Radio on January 29: ``If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq to the detriment of our troops and/or innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly . . . It makes common sense for the commander-in-chief to say to our troops and the Iraqi people--and the Iraqi government that we will help you defend yourself from people that want to sow discord and harm.'' In his January 10 address, Bush went on to fill in a second item in any future casus belli: Iran is seeking nuclear weapons to dominate the Middle East to the detriment of the United States' friends in the region--a goal that it simply cannot be allowed to achieve. In response to such a possibility, Bush declared, ``We're also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East.'' These include deploying a second US aircraft-carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf region, consisting of the USS John C Stennis and a flotilla of cruisers, destroyers and submarines (presumably to provide additional air and missile assets for strikes on Iran), along with additional Patriot anti- missile batteries (presumably to shoot down any Iranian missiles that might be fired in retaliation for an air attack on the country and its nuclear facilities). ``And,'' Bush added, ``we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.'' Bush added a third item to the casus belli in his State of the Union address on January 23. After years of describing Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda as the greatest threats to U.S. interests in the Middle East, he now introduced a new menace: the resurgent Shi'ite branch of Islam led by Iran. Aside from al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremists, he explained, ``It has also become clear that we face an escalating danger from Shi'ite extremists who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East.'' Many of these extremists, he noted, ``are known to take direction from the regime in Iran'', including the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. As if to nail down this point, he offered some hair-raising imagery right out of the Left Behind best-selling book series so beloved of Christian evangelicals and their neoconservative allies: ``If American forces step back [from Iraq] before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides. We could expect an epic battle between Shi'ite extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists backed by al-Qaeda and supporters of the old regime. A contagion of violence could spill across the country, and in time the entire region could be drawn into the conflict. For America, this is a nightmare scenario. For the enemy, this is the objective.'' As refined by Bush speechwriters, this, then, is the third item in his casus belli for attacking Iran: to prevent a ``nightmare scenario'' in which the Shi'ite leaders of Iran might emerge as the grandmasters of regional instability, using such proxies as Hezbollah to imperil Israel and pro- American regimes in Jordan, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia--with potentially catastrophic consequences for the safety of Middle Eastern oil supplies. You can be sure of what Bush will say to this in his future address: no U.S. president would ever allow such a scenario to come to pass. Many of these themes were reiterated in Bush's White House Valentine's Day (February 14) press conference. Once again, Iraq was meant to be the main story, but Iran captured all the headlines. Bush's most widely cited comments on Iran focused on claims of Iranian involvement in the delivery of sophisticated versions of the roadside IEDs that have been responsible for many of the U.S. casualties in recent months. Just a few days earlier, unidentified U.S. military officials in Baghdad had declared that elements of the Iranian military--specifically, the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards--were supplying the deadly devices to Shi'ite militias in Iraq, and that high-ranking Iranian government officials were aware of the deliveries. These claims were contested by other U.S. officials and members of Congress who expressed doubt about the reliability of the evidence and the intelligence work behind it, but Bush evinced no such uncertainty: ``What we do know is that the Quds Force was instrumental in providing these deadly IEDs to networks inside of Iraq. We know that. And we also know that the Quds Force is a part of the Iranian government. That's a known.'' What is not known, he continued, is just how high up in the Iranian government went the decision-making that led such IEDs to be delivered to the Shi'ite militias in Iraq. But that doesn't matter, he explained. ``What matters is, is that they're there . . . We know they're there, and we're going to protect our troops.'' As commander-in-chief, he insisted, he would ``do what is necessary to protect our soldiers in harm's way''. He then went on to indicate that ``the biggest problem I see is the Iranians' desire to have a nuclear weapon''. He expressed his wish that this problem can be ``dealt with'' in a peaceful way--by the Iranians voluntarily agreeing to cease their program to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels. But he also made it clear that the onus was purely on Tehran to take the necessary action to avoid unspecified harm: ``I would like to be at the . . . have been given a chance for us to explain that we have no desire to harm the Iranian people.'' No reporters at the press conference asked him to explain this odd twist of phrase, delivered in the past tense, about his regret that he was unable to explain to the Iranian people why he had meant them no harm--presumably after the fact. However, if you view this as the Bush version of a Freudian slip, one obvious conclusion can be drawn: that Bush has already made the decision to begin the countdown for an attack on Iran, and only total capitulation by the Iranians could possibly bring the process to a halt. Further evidence for this conclusion is provided by Bush's repeated reference to Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter. On three separate occasions during the press conference he praised Russia, China and the ``EU3''--the United Kingdom, France and Germany--for framing the December 23 UN Security Council resolution condemning Iran's nuclear activities and imposing economic sanctions on Iran in the context of Chapter 7--that is, of ``Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace and Acts of Aggression''. This sets the stage for the international community, under UN leadership, to take such steps as may be deemed necessary ``to maintain or restore international peace and stability'', ranging from mild economic sanctions to fullscale war (steps that are described in Articles 39-51). But the December 23 resolution was specifically framed under Article 41, which entails ``measures not involving the use of armed force'', a stipulation demanded by China and Russia, which have categorically ruled out the use of military force to resolve the nuclear dispute with Iran. One suspects that Bush has Chapter 7 on the brain, because he now intends to ask for a new resolution under Article 42, which allows the use of military force to restore international peace and stability. But it is nearly inconceivable that Russia and China will approve such a resolution. Such approval would also be tantamount to acknowledging U.S. hegemony worldwide, and this is something they are simply unwilling to do. So we can expect several months of fruitless diplomacy at the United Nations in which the United States may achieve slightly more severe economic sanctions under Chapter 41 but not approval for military action under Chapter 42. Bush knows that this is the inevitable outcome, and so I am convinced that, in his various speeches and meetings with reporters, he is already preparing the way for a future address to the nation. In it, he will speak somberly of a tireless U.S. effort to secure a meaningful resolution from the United Nations on Iran with real teeth in it and his deep disappointment that no such resolution has been not forthcoming. He will also point out that, despite the heroic efforts of American diplomats as well as military commanders in Iraq, Iran continues to pose a vital and unchecked threat to U.S. security in Iraq, in the region, and even--via its nuclear program--in the wider world. Further diplomacy, he will insist, appears futile and yet Iran must be stopped. Hence, he will say, ``I have made the unavoidable decision to eliminate this vital threat through direct military action,'' and will announce--in language eerily reminiscent of his address to the nation on March 19, 2003, that a massive air offensive against Iran has already been under way for several hours.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, I had not intended to speak, but after listening to these two people talk about what the House is doing, I think we are going to have to have some civics lessons around here for Republicans. They never followed the regular order. The way things are supposed to happen in the House is you drop in a bill and it goes to committee, and you have hearings, and you have markups, and you work off the floor before you bring things to the floor. When the Republicans were in control, they never had committee hearings, they never had anybody come in, they never had any markups. It was all written in the Speaker's Office and brought to the Rules Committee and put out on the floor without any preparation. This Congress is preparing issues that will be brought to the floor over the next several months. We are not asleep. We are just doing the regular order, which is going to committee. In the Ways and Means Committee today we discussed global warming. There wasn't one single hearing in this House on global warming when the Republicans were in session, and yet it is the biggest issue facing this Nation.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, finally, grudgingly, the administration has agreed to talk to Syria and Iran about the civil war that is raging in Iraq. This should have happened at least 2 years ago, so why now? Has the President finally concluded what many of us have said for a long time: That you cannot shoot your way to a peace in Iraq? That would be a hopeful sign, but it is doubtful since he continues to escalate the U.S. presence in the middle of a civil war. The apparent movement towards diplomacy comes at a curious time. The American people told their government last November to get their soldiers out of harm's way when they gave the Democrats a 2-year contract on the majority. And it didn't take long for this House to make a down payment on rebuilding trust with the American people. Despite repeated Presidential claims that meant nothing, the overwhelming passage of Speaker Pelosi's first step in getting U.S. soldiers out of harm's way was the shot heard round the world. No one wants to move faster than me in getting the soldiers out of Iraq. But every journey starts with a single step, and we have done it. The American people and other nations welcomed the Speaker's leadership in getting this country to begin to set a new course in Iraq based on a reality, and not based on the same old rhetoric from the White House. They continue to bluster; so what else is new? There are serious mainstream Middle East leaders who believe the U.S. policy has more to do with extraction than engagement. By extraction, they don't mean U.S. soldiers being extracted out of harm's way, they are referring to extracting Iraq's oil. The Asia Times yesterday published two commentaries that are reverberating throughout the Middle East. One is called, ``U.S.'s Iraq Oil Grab is a Done Deal.'' And the other is entitled: ``Big Oil In, Stability Out Under New Iraqi Law.'' I will include the two articles for the Record. As many articles in recent days have pointed out, the President's representatives in Iraq used intense pressure behind the scenes to get the Iraq government to take the first step in making production-sharing agreements, PSAs, the law of Iraq. There are scenarios in which investment and production will be a benefit to the Iraq people, but the Iraq people have to be solely in charge. As it stands, and as many fear, the PSA language approved over the weekend could indenture Iraq's oil wealth to U.S. oil interests for decades to come. As passed by the Iraq parliament, a new centralized government agency in Iraq, closely tied to the U.S., would have ultimate control over who gets access to Iraq's vast oil resources. The oil industry itself says it costs one single dollar to extract a barrel of oil in Iraq, but that barrel brings $60 today on the world market. How does big oil, closely aligned to the President and Vice President, spell conservation? It is spelled I-R-A-Q. Here is the U.S.-Iraq equation as seen by people from the Middle East: Billions of barrels of oil, billions of dollars in profits, dozens of U.S. military bases across Iraq, and thousands of U.S. soldiers remaining in Iraq. The bottom line is this: Is the President hoping Iraq will import democracy, or will it export oil under the thumb of U.S. oil interests? The production-sharing agreements have not yet been enacted into law. The outcome is still uncertain. But one thing is certain, production- sharing agreements that favor the U.S. means the U.S. will be in Iraq for decades. The President has expressed a new found interest in diplomacy. Are we going to negotiate with Iran at the same time we push for PSA agreements to become law? A lot of people in the Middle East wonder. The U.S. needs to state its intentions if there is any hope for a diplomatic solution in Iraq. We not only need to extract U.S. soldiers from Iraq, we also need to extract U.S. oil interests from dictating the oil future for the Iraqi people. The deeper the U.S. goes in influencing the distribution of Iraq oil wealth, the more we inflame the tensions and suspicions about why we invaded Iraq in the first place. Remember weapons of mass destruction and Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and democracy? Now it becomes clear what it is really all about: Getting control of Iraq oil. Madam Speaker, we have got to have the President come clean. Perhaps he will do a White House speech on this. [From the Asia Times, Feb. 27, 2007] U.S.'s Iraq Oil Grab Is a Done Deal (By Pepe Escobar) ``By 2010 we will need [a further] 50 million barrels a day. The Middle East, with two-thirds of the oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize lies.''--U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, then Halliburton chief executive officer, London, autumn 1999. U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney might as well declare the Iraq war over and out. As far as they--and the humongous energy interests they defend-- are concerned, only now is the mission really accomplished. More than half a trillion dollars spent and perhaps half a million Iraqis killed have come down to this. On Monday, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's cabinet in Baghdad approved the draft of the new Iraqi oil law. The government regards it as ``a major national project''. The key point of the law is that Iraq's immense oil wealth (115 billion barrels of proven reserves, third in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iran) will be under the iron rule of a fuzzy ``Federal Oil and Gas Council'' boasting ``a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq''. That is, nothing less than predominantly U.S. Big Oil executives. The law represents no less than institutionalized raping and pillaging of Iraq's oil wealth. It represents the death knell of nationalized (from 1972 to 1975) Iraqi resources, now replaced by production sharing agreements (PSAs)--which translate into savage privatization and monster profit rates of up to 75% for (basically U.S.) Big Oil. Sixty-five of Iraq's roughly 80 oilfields already known will be offered for Big Oil to exploit. As if this were not enough, the law reduces in practice the role of Baghdad to a minimum. Oil wealth, in theory, will be distributed directly to Kurds in the north, Shi'ites in the south and Sunnis in the center. For all practical purposes, Iraq will be partitioned into three statelets. Most of the country's reserves are in the Shi'ite-dominated south, while the Kurdish north holds the best prospects for future drilling. The approval of the draft law by the fractious 275-member Iraqi Parliament, in March, will be a mere formality. Hussain al-Shahristani, Iraq's oil minister, is beaming. So is dodgy Barnham Salih: a Kurd, committed cheerleader of the U.S. invasion and occupation, then deputy prime minister, big PSA fan, and head of a committee that was debating the law. But there was not much to be debated. The law was in essence drafted, behind locked doors, by a U.S. consulting firm hired by the Bush administration and then carefully retouched by Big Oil, the International Monetary Fund, former U.S. deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz' World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development. It's virtually a U.S. law (its original language is English, not Arabic). Scandalously, Iraqi public opinion had absolutely no knowledge of it--not to mention the overwhelming majority of Parliament members. Were this to be a truly representative Iraqi government, any change to the legislation concerning the highly sensitive question of oil wealth would have to be approved by a popular referendum. In real life, Iraq's vital national interests are in the hands of a small bunch of highly impressionable (or downright corrupt) technocrats. Ministries are no more than political party feuds; the national interest is never considered, only private, ethnic and sectarian interests. Corruption and theft are endemic. Big Oil will profit handsomely--and long-term, 30 years minimum, with fabulous rates of return--from a former developing-world stalwart methodically devastated into failed-state status. In these past few weeks, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been crucial in mollifying the Kurds. In the end, in practice, the pro-U.S. Kurds will have all the power to sign oil contracts with whatever companies they want. Sunnis will be more dependent on the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. And Shi'ites will be more or less midway between total independence in the south and Baghdad's dictum (which they control anyway). But the crucial point remains: nobody will sign anything unless the ``advisers'' at the U.S.-manipulated Federal Oil and Gas Council say so. Nobody wants to colonial-style PSAs forced down their throat anymore. According to the International Energy Agency, PSAs apply to only 12% of global oil reserves, in cases where costs are very high and nobody knows what will be found (certainly not the Iraqi case). No big Middle Eastern oil producer works with PSAs. Russia and Venezuela are renegotiating all of them. Bolivia nationalized its gas. Algeria and Indonesia have new rules for future contracts. But Iraq, of course, is not a sovereign country. Big Oil is obviously ecstatic--not only ExxonMobil, but also ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP and Shell (which have collected invaluable info on two of Iraq's biggest oilfields), TotalFinaElf, Lukoil from Russia and the Chinese majors. Iraq has as many as 70 undeveloped fields--``small'' ones hold a minimum of a billion barrels. As desert western Iraq has not even been exploited, reserves may reach 300 billion barrels--way more than Saudi Arabia. Gargantuan profits under the PSA arrangement are in a class by themselves. Iraqi oil costs only US$1 a barrel to extract. With a barrel worth $60 and up, happy days are here again. What revenue the regions do get will be distributed to all 18 provinces based on population size--an apparent concession to the Sunnis, whose central areas have relatively few proven reserves. The Sunni Arab muqawama (resistance) certainly has other ideas--as in future rolling thunder against pipelines, refineries and Western personnel. Iraq's oil independence will not go down quietly--at least among Sunnis. On the same day the oil law was being approved, a powerful bomb at the Ministry of Municipalities killed at least 12 people and injured 42, including Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi. Mahdi has always been a feverish supporter of the oil law. He's a top official of the Shi'ite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (SCIRI). A whole case can be made of SCIRI delivering Iraq's Holy Grail to Bush/Cheney and Big Oil--in exchange for not being chased out of power by the Pentagon. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the SCIRI's leader, is much more of a Bush ally than Maliki, who is from the Da'wa Party. No wonder SCIRI's Badr Organization and their death squads were never the target of Washington's wrath--unlike Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army (Muqtada is fiercely against the oil law). The SCIRI certainly listened to the White House, which has always made it very clear: any more funds to the Iraqi government are tied up with passing the oil law. Bush and Cheney got their oily cake--and they will eat it, too (or be drenched in its glory). Mission accomplished: permanent, sprawling military bases on the eastern flank of the Arab nation and control of some of largest, untapped oil wealth on the planet--a key geostrategic goal of the New American Century. Now it's time to move east, bomb Iran, force regime change and--what else?--force PSAs down their Persian throats.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, today a story appeared in the Washington Post entitled ``Pentagon Red Tape Keeps Medical Records From Doctors of the Wounded.'' The Defense Department is refusing to give the records of people wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan to physicians who are taking care of them in the Veterans Department. It is absolutely unbelievable that there could be that kind of bureaucratic snafu. Now the Defense Department says, We don't have the authority to give the records on the wounded that are leaving us and going to the Veterans Department. Absolute bureaucratic nonsense. I have introduced H.R. 1128 with Mr. Filner, which gives that authority to the Defense Department. I hope that other Members will sign this bill, and that we will pass it by unanimous consent when we return to the House after the Presidents' Day break. In the next week, there are going to be people who are injured and transferred to the veterans hospitals who can't get their records transferred. How can a doctor take care of somebody if they don't know what happened to them on the battlefield? This is the kind of thing we have to stop if we support the troops. [From the Washington Post, Feb. 16, 2007] Pentagon Red Tape Keeps Medical Records From Doctors of the Wounded (By Al Kamen) Department of Veterans Affairs doctors are furious over a recent decision by the Pentagon to block their access to medical information needed to treat severely injured troops arriving at VA hospitals from Iraq and Afghanistan. The VA physicians handle troops with serious brain injuries and other major health problems. They rely on digital medical records that track the care given wounded troops from the moment of their arrival at a field hospital through their evacuation to the United States. About 30 VA doctors in four trauma centers around the country have treated about 200 severely wounded soldiers and Marines. The docs had been receiving the complete digital records from the Pentagon until the end of January, using the Pentagon's Joint Patient Tracking Application. But on Jan. 25, when Shane McNamee, a physician in the Richmond VA Medical Center, tried to get the full records, he couldn't. He sent an urgent e-mail to VA chief liaison officer Edward Huycke. ``My JPTA account has been disabled within last few days,'' McNamee wrote. ``I called the hotline and was told that all VA accounts have been locked. Could not get a good answer why. Anyhow--I have 4 [Iraq/Afghanistan] service members to arrive within the next 2 days. This information is terribly important,'' the doctor wrote. Thirty-four minutes later Huycke e-mailed back: ``Ok, Shane. Will get on it. Not sure what's up.'' An hour or so later, a senior VA official forwarded McNamee's e-mail to Lt. Col. David Parramore at the Pentagon, saying that McNamee ``needs his access back to JPTA to provide the best possible treatment for soldiers injured in [Iraq/Afghanistan] arriving there in a few days. Can you help?'' Tommy Morris, director of Deployment Health Systems, responded the next morning to Parramore's inquiry, after contacting Ellen Embry, deputy assistant secretary of defense for force health protection. ``I spoke with Embry and no agreements, no data sharing via access to JPTA.'' The access cutoff came after Morris, in a Jan. 23 e-mail, instructed a colleague: ``If the VA currently has access I need a list of persons and I need their accounts shut off ASAP. It is illegal for them to have access without data use agreements and access controls in place by federal regulations and public law.'' There have been meetings between VA and Pentagon officials. The Pentagon declined to comment yesterday. VA officials apparently thought it might have been resolved Monday. But an e-mail Monday from Morris to a co-worker said: ``The leadership has not authorized the VA accounts to be turned back on, in case someone approaches you about this.'' Last week, Sens. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii) and Larry E. Craig (Idaho)--the chairman and ranking Republican on the Veterans' Affairs Committee--wrote David S.C. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel, of their ``deep concern'' about VA trauma center doctors not having access to complete records. ``For those servicemembers suffering from a traumatic brain injury,'' they wrote, ``VA's access to in-theater imaging is an important and valuable tool for tracking their patient's progress since being wounded or injured.'' They suggested the VA doctor be given temporary access to JPTA while the data- sharing questions are worked out. They're still awaiting an appropriate response. McNamee is still waiting for the records.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, due to a death in my family I needed to depart Washington, DC, last week and missed several votes on February 8, 2007. Had I been here, I would have voted ``aye'' on: rollcall vote 87, the Hastings of Florida amendment; rollcall vote 88, the Rogers (MI) amendment; rollcall vote 89, the Weller amendment; rollcall vote 90, the Cantor amendment; and rollcall vote 92, final passage of H.R. 547. I would have voted ``no'' on rollcall vote 91, the Motion to Recommit.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I proudly stand today with fellow veterans as the House debates the most damaging, costly, and divisive course of U.S. military involvement since Vietnam. At a naval station in California, I treated combat veterans returning home from Vietnam, many with severe physical and psychological wounds like PTSD and the effects of agent orange. After Vietnam, America swore there would never be another tragic military misadventure, but that is exactly what is happening in Iraq. The American people want this Congress to end the war and to bring our soldiers home now, not 2 years from now at the end of this President's term. That is what the American people elected Democrats to do in November. What we do this week is a miniscule little step. Step two will come when we get to appropriations next month. We have to get out of Iraq. We have to get out now, not 2 years from now. We are killing them, they are killing us, and nothing is getting better. And the reasons we started this whole war have turned out to be false. The American people know this, and today they are watching our debate. They will judge our actions. Getting U.S. soldiers out of Iraq has been my top priority since they were sent there 4 years ago under false pretenses. And the new claim by the President that escalating the war will reduce the violence is just another attempt to mislead the American people. It is a lot like Lyndon Johnson sending the bombers into Cambodia and Laos. They don't accept it. The American people don't accept it and they won't. Those who claim we cannot leave Iraq without causing chaos ignore reality. I ask to insert in the Record a piece by Retired Lieutenant General and Reagan administration NSA Director William Odom that decisively debunks this argument. [From the Washington Post, Feb. 11, 2007] Victory Is Not an Option (By William E. Odom) The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro- American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat. Its gloomy implications--hedged, as intelligence agencies prefer, in rubbery language that cannot soften its impact-- put the intelligence community and the American public on the same page. The public awakened to the reality of failure in Iraq last year and turned the Republicans out of control of Congress to wake it up. But a majority of its members are still asleep, or only half-awake to their new writ to end the war soon. Perhaps this is not surprising. Americans do not warm to defeat or failure, and our politicians are famously reluctant to admit their own responsibility for anything resembling those un-American outcomes. So they beat around the bush, wringing hands and debating ``nonbinding resolutions'' that oppose the president's plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. For the moment, the collision of the public's clarity of mind, the president's relentless pursuit of defeat and Congress's anxiety has paralyzed us. We may be doomed to two more years of chasing the mirage of democracy in Iraq and possibly widening the war to Iran. But this is not inevitable. A Congress, or a president, prepared to quit the game of ``who gets the blame'' could begin to alter American strategy in ways that will vastly improve the prospects of a more stable Middle East. No task is more important to the well-being of the United States. We face great peril in that troubled region, and improving our prospects will be difficult. First of all, it will require, from Congress at least, public acknowledgment that the president's policy is based on illusions, not realities. There never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq. Most Americans need no further convincing, but two truths ought to put the matter beyond question: First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly ``constitutional''-- meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq. Strangely, American political scientists whose business it is to know these things have been irresponsibly quiet. In the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion, neoconservative agitators shouted insults at anyone who dared to mention the many findings of academic research on how democracies evolve. They also ignored our own struggles over two centuries to create the democracy Americans enjoy today. Somehow Iraqis are now expected to create a constitutional order in a country with no conditions favoring it. This is not to say that Arabs cannot become liberal democrats. When they immigrate to the United States, many do so quickly. But it is to say that Arab countries, as well as a large majority of all countries, find creating a stable constitutional democracy beyond their capacities. Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation. (In 1914, a majority of the public favored supporting Germany against Britain.) Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis' rising animosity toward the United States. Even supporters of an American military presence say that it is acceptable temporarily and only to prevent either of the warring sides in Iraq from winning. Today the Iraqi government survives only because its senior members and their families live within the heavily guarded Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and military command. As Congress awakens to these realities--and a few members have bravely pointed them out--will it act on them? Not necessarily. Too many lawmakers have fallen for the myths that are invoked to try to sell the president's new war aims. Let us consider the most pernicious of them. (1) We must continue the war to prevent the terrible aftermath that will occur if our forces are withdrawn soon. Reflect on the double-think of this formulation. We are now fighting to prevent what our invasion made inevitable! Undoubtedly we will leave a mess--the mess we created, which has become worse each year we have remained. Lawmakers gravely proclaim their opposition to the war, but in the next breath express fear that quitting it will leave a blood bath, a civil war, a terrorist haven, a ``failed state,'' or some other horror. But this ``aftermath'' is already upon us; a prolonged U.S. occupation cannot prevent what already exists. (2) We must continue the war to prevent Iran's influence from growing in Iraq. This is another absurd notion. One of the president's initial war aims, the creation of a democracy in Iraq, ensured increased Iranian influence, both in Iraq and the region. Electoral democracy, predictably, would put Shiite groups in power--groups supported by Iran since Saddam Hussein repressed them in 1991. Why are so many members of Congress swallowing the claim that prolonging the war is now supposed to prevent precisely what starting the war inexorably and predictably caused? Fear that Congress will confront this contradiction helps explain the administration and neocon drumbeat we now hear for expanding the war to Iran. Here we see shades of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy in Vietnam: widen the war into Cambodia and Laos. Only this time, the adverse consequences would be far greater. Iran's ability to hurt U.S. forces in Iraq are not trivial. And the anti-American backlash in the region would be larger, and have more lasting consequences. (3) We must prevent the emergence of a new haven for al- Qaeda in Iraq. But it was the U.S. invasion that opened Iraq's doors to al-Qaeda. The longer U.S. forces have remained there, the stronger al-Qaeda has become. Yet its strength within the Kurdish and Shiite areas is trivial. After a U.S. withdrawal, it will probably play a continuing role in helping the Sunni groups against the Shiites and the Kurds. Whether such foreign elements could remain or thrive in Iraq after the resolution of civil war is open to question. Meanwhile, continuing the war will not push al- Qaeda outside Iraq. On the contrary, the American presence is the glue that holds al-Qaeda there now. (4) We must continue to fight in order to ``support the troops.'' This argument effectively paralyzes almost all members of Congress. Lawmakers proclaim in grave tones a litany of problems in Iraq sufficient to justify a rapid pullout. Then they reject that logical conclusion, insisting we cannot do so because we must support the troops. Has anybody asked the troops? During their first tours, most may well have favored ``staying the course''--whatever that meant to them--but now in their second, third and fourth tours, many are changing their minds. We see evidence of that in the many news stories about unhappy troops being sent back to Iraq. Veterans groups are beginning to make public the case for bringing them home. Soldiers and officers in Iraq are speaking out critically to reporters on the ground. But the strangest aspect of this rationale for continuing the war is the implication that the troops are somehow responsible for deciding to continue the president's course. That political and moral responsibility belongs to the president, not the troops. Did not President Harry S Truman make it clear that ``the buck stops'' in the Oval Office? If the president keeps dodging it, where does it stop? With Congress? Embracing the four myths gives Congress excuses not to exercise its power of the purse to end the war and open the way for a strategy that might actually bear fruit. The first and most critical step is to recognize that fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy. Getting out of Iraq is the pre-condition for creating new strategic options. Withdrawal will take away the conditions that allow our enemies in the region to enjoy our pain. It will awaken those European states reluctant to collaborate with us in Iraq and the region. Second, we must recognize that the United States alone cannot stabilize the Middle East. Third, we must acknowledge that most of our policies are actually destabilizing the region. Spreading democracy, using sticks to try to prevent nuclear proliferation, threatening ``regime change,'' using the hysterical rhetoric of the ``global war on terrorism''--all undermine the stability we so desperately need in the Middle East. Fourth, we must redefine our purpose. It must be a stable region, not primarily a democratic Iraq. We must redirect our military operations so they enhance rather than undermine stability. We can write off the war as a ``tactical draw'' and make ``regional stability'' our measure of ``victory.'' That single step would dramatically realign the opposing forces in the region, where most states want stability. Even many in the angry mobs of young Arabs shouting profanities against the United States want predictable order, albeit on better social and economic terms than they now have. Realigning our diplomacy and military capabilities to achieve order will hugely reduce the numbers of our enemies and gain us new and important allies. This cannot happen, however, until our forces are moving out of Iraq. Why should Iran negotiate to relieve our pain as long as we are increasing its influence in Iraq and beyond? Withdrawal will awaken most leaders in the region to their own need for U.S.- led diplomacy to stabilize their neighborhood. If Bush truly wanted to rescue something of his historical legacy, he would seize the initiative to implement this kind of strategy. He would eventually be held up as a leader capable of reversing direction by turning an imminent, tragic defeat into strategic recovery. If he stays on his present course, he will leave Congress the opportunity to earn the credit for such a turnaround. It is already too late to wait for some presidential candidate for 2008 to retrieve the situation. If Congress cannot act, it, too, will live in infamy. Chaos, not democracy, has taken root in Iraq, and chaos will continue to take U.S. lives until we act in our best interest and order our people out of harm's way. News accounts continue to remind us that our soldiers don't even have the proper body and vehicle armor. We cannot adequately protect the soldiers already serving, but more were ordered in anyway. If you want the most basic reason to vote to oppose escalation, it is that we haven't properly equipped the troops already in Iraq, and we are not doing any better by the troops we are sending in now. Just being on the record against the President's escalation of this war is not enough. The only way to diffuse the violence in Iraq is to defund the war in Iraq. Congress has the power to control the funding, and we have the responsibility to exercise the power vested in us by the Constitution. That is what the American people elected us to do. We must exercise our constitutional power as a co-equal branch of government and do what the President is unwilling to do: bring our soldiers home. When appropriations for Iraq come to the floor, I intend to offer an amendment based on the 1970 Hatfield-McGovern appropriations amendment to end the war in Vietnam. It will be an amendment to provide funding to protect our soldiers as we bring them home in a planned, safe, and orderly way, and to prohibit taxpayers' monies from being used to continue or expand the war in Iraq. This will provide a transition for the Iraqi security forces using a benchmark that matters: the date when U.S. troops will be out of there. The Iraqis can't help themselves until we get out. Right now, almost anything constructive that Iraqis do is seen as collaborating with the United States occupiers. We have to get out of the way so the Iraqis can solve their own problems. We can't help; we just make good targets. So I want to encourage everyone in the House to vote for this resolution. I want to make it the biggest, strongest, clearest vote that we can get to let the President know for the second time, he ignored the election, that the Congress says ``no.'' I know that many Members of the Republican Party are as distressed as I am about Iraq, and I admire their courage in standing up to their President. Every veteran, including myself, in this House and in this Nation is very proud of our soldiers. They have done what we have asked them to do. It is time for new orders to be issued. It is time to end the U.S. role in the Iraq civil war. It is not a war on terrorism; it is a civil war. And bring our soldiers home. We can begin to do it immediately. That is what I advocate and that is what the American people expect from us.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, the President and his administration would be wise to avoid making Iran the next Iraq. Despite that, the demonizing of Iran has begun as the President tries to divert the attention of the American people away from the Iraq debacle. Instead of advocating diplomacy in the region as recommended by the Iraq Study Group and countless leaders in both political parties, the President is making veiled threats that are becoming increasingly worrisome. The boiling caldron of violence in the Middle East is growing hotter, and to many people, the policies and pronouncements of the President concerning Iran are seen as throwing gasoline on the fire. As the situation worsens in Iraq, the President talks more and more about Iran, as if the attention of the American people and the world can so easily be diverted. That is not going to work this time. The focus of the American people, indeed the focus of the world, is on the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the disastrous war the President continues to wage and escalate. We know he is raising the stakes in Iraq. Many fear Iran is not behind. And we see an irony in that. Leaders in the Middle East I met with recently in Jordan blame Paul Bremer, the President's first administrator in Iraq, believing Bremer, unwittingly or otherwise, handed Iraq to the regime in Iran. He did it with disastrous decisions. First, he dismantled the Iraqi army. That left the border between Iraq and Iran unguarded and open to the infiltration of weapons and insurgents to foment violence in Iraq. Bremer gave the Shi'a effective control by mandating they receive a majority of seats in reconstituting an Iraqi government. These decisions opened the border and at the same time tightened relationships between Iranian Shi'a and Iraqi Shi'a. It set the stage for Iran's influence to grow stronger and stronger inside Iraq and unleashed a torrent of violence, pitting Iraqi against Iraqi with American soldiers caught in the cross fire. Is there any wonder that many Iraqis believe their nation is being handed over to Iran by the U.S.? Now, many believe the President's saber rattling toward Iran has less to do with its efforts to develop a nuclear weapon and more to do with his failure to understand the region and contain Iran from the outset of the war. Thoughtful people in the United States and around the world fear the President is compounding the trouble, not confronting the problems in a troubled region. Where does all this saber rattling go? History shows us the way. In less than one generation, we have done what we vowed never to do again: We have allowed a President to stampede the Nation into a hopeless war, not because we had to but because he wanted to. This President believed he could have victory by saying it was so. We have seen the tragic consequences of that. There are so many parallels between the Iraq debacle and Vietnam; it is unbelievable. The President and many people in America forgot the lessons of history when a blank check was given to a President in Iraq. There are still some lessons to learn. The Vietnam War was going badly, so much so that an earlier President did not merely escalate the war, he expanded it into Laos and Cambodia, secret bombing that did not shorten the Vietnam War or offer a path to resolution. My fear is that we will forget all the lessons of the Vietnam War. It is time to ask the question: Is Iran the next Laos or Cambodia? With things going badly in Iraq, will the President continue to ignore the lessons of history and order the American military not merely to escalate but to expand the war beyond Iraq? I wish a question like this did not have to be asked, but we cannot watch Iraq, consider Vietnam, and not worry that a President who refuses to learn from history or admit mistakes is not doomed to repeating the same mistakes. Military action is not the answer in Iraq, in Iran or Gaza, or any other flash point in the Middle East. We need to dispatch an army all right, an army of diplomats armed not with bullets but with ideas, with resolve and with a book of American history in every briefcase. The way out of Iraq must begin here on Capitol Hill, because down the street at the White House, they are only talking about more ways in and, we fear, other places to go. This war must end now, and there should be a binding resolution to indicate that to the President and to the American people.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the President has isolated himself from all the evidence, military advice, members of his own party, and the American people. He is not staying the course in Iraq. The President is making matters even worse by escalating the war. He has ordered at least 21,500 more U.S. soldiers into the middle of a bloody and violent civil war. This President has stepped backward in history. He is making the same tragic mistakes of Vietnam all over again. The President's speeches won't stop a bullet, and they won't protect soldiers from the tsunami of violence inundating Iraq. Our soldiers don't have enough equipment or support. Soldiers know it, but the White House ignores it. Some of the best newspapers and magazines in the Nation are reporting the facts, and they are not just repeating the President's spin. From the McClatchy newspapers, here is a recent headline: ``Soldiers in Iraq view troop surge as a lost cause.'' From the San Francisco Chronicle: ``Corners cut in rush to add troops; shorter training time, lack of equipment hurt readiness, experts say.'' And the latest issue of Business Week said: ``Military equipment: Missing in action.'' I will enter these stories into the Record. [From BusinessWeek] Military Equipment: Missing in Action A new Defense audit says the Pentagon has failed to properly equip soldiers in Iraq--just as the President struggles to find support for a troop increase (By Dawn Kopecki) The Inspector General for the Defense Dept. is concerned that the U.S. military has failed to adequately equip soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially for nontraditional duties such as training Iraqi security forces and handling detainees, according to a summary of a new audit obtained by BusinessWeek. The findings come as the Pentagon prepares to send another 21,500 troops to Iraq and as Democratic leaders levy threats to restrict funding for a war that's already cost about $500 billion. The Army alone expects to spend an extra $70 billion on an additional 65,000 permanent troops from fiscal year 2009 through 2013. According to Army officials, $18 billion of that will be spent on equipment. The Inspector General found that the Pentagon hasn't been able to properly equip the soldiers it already has. Many have gone without enough guns, ammunition, and other necessary supplies to ``effectively complete their missions'' and have had to cancel or postpone some assignments while waiting for the proper gear, according to the report from auditors with the Defense Dept. Inspector General's office. Soldiers have also found themselves short on body armor, armored vehicles, and communications equipment, among other things, auditors found. ``As a result, service members performed missions without the proper equipment, used informal procedures to obtain equipment and sustainment support, and canceled or postponed missions while waiting to receive equipment,'' reads the executive summary dated Jan. 25. Service members often borrowed or traded with each other to get the needed supplies, according to the summary. Pentagon officials did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment. The audit supports news reports and other evidence that U.S. troops have been stretched too thin or have performed tasks for which they were ill-prepared. It is likely to add fuel to the opposition to President George W. Bush's decision to send more troops to Iraq in an effort to quell the violence there. Already, support for the troop increase is tepid in the Senate, where Democrats are preparing to vote on a nonbinding statement against the President's plan. While lawmakers have threatened to reduce funding for the war, few have publicly committed to using the ``power of the purse'' to block funding for the troop surge. ``The thing we're going to do now is very important, to show the American people that the United States Senate, on a bipartisan basis, does not support an escalation,'' says Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). ``Even the Republicans are very timid in their support for the President at this stage.'' In the summary of the Inspector General's audit, the equipment shortages were attributed to basic management failures among military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. Central Command lacked standard policies for requesting and tracking equipment requirements or for equipping units to perform nontraditional duties. Auditors surveyed 1,100 service members stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan from all four military branches, the National Guard, and Reserves. The Inspector General recommended that the Pentagon establish new internal controls and policies to address the funding, equipping, and sustaining forces performing nontraditional duties.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, on behalf of loving family and friends, I enter into the Record our memory of Roseanna Wabel McDermott, born in Streator, Illinois, who died peacefully on January 29, 2007, at Columbia Lutheran Home in Seattle. We will miss her gentle spirit and twinkling eye. Roseanna and her husband, Mac, came to the great Northwest in 1971. Early in their marriage, they had founded a church in their garage in the Chicago suburbs. Throughout her life, Roseanna continued to live her Christian faith of love, charity and compassion. She fundamentally rejected racism and unjust war. A true mid-Westerner and a bride of the Depression, Roseanna had sizeable grit and an entrepreneur's resourcefulness. She could make something out of nothing, and for her everything had at least one more use before it went into the trash. She re-wired lamps, rejuvenated Charlie Brown Christmas trees with a bit of careful grafting, and mended furniture. She was a saver--of string, rubber bands, and plastic twist ties. And, she showed us there was always hope for a dying plant, a broken chair, or a difficult personality. As a consummate gardener, Roseanna fed her family from her backyard and taught her offspring the wonders of composting, the satisfaction of baking and the skill of darning. She was a crack gin rummy player (despite her misgivings about the danger of cards), and she loved the interaction and challenge of a good game of Scrabble. She enjoyed all things northwest--Dungeness crab, Pacific oysters and the Seattle Mariners. Roseanna possessed a wide curiosity and believed in the power of education. A Streator High School graduate, yet financially unable to go to college herself, she sacrificed for the education of her children and served as their constant reminder of the benefits of hard work and life-long learning. Roseanna's loving presence and beautiful smile were dwarfed only by her huge heart and unwavering belief in the goodness of all. She is preceded in death by her husband of 68 years, William Morrell (Mac), and survived by her children Jim, John, Lois, Mark; her grandchildren Katherine, Jim and Nicholas; and, her great grandchildren Kendall and Lachlan. In tribute to their loving care of Roseanna, donations may be sent to Columbia Lutheran Home (columbialutheranhome.com) 4700 Phinney Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98103. Please join in celebration of this beloved woman on February 10th at University Congregational United Church of Christ at 2 p.m. (4515 16th Ave NE, Seattle).

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, due to a death in my family I was unable to travel to Washington, DC, and missed votes in the House of Representatives on January 29, 30, and 31. Had I been here, I would have voted ``aye'' on: 1. H.R. 521, 2. H.R. 49, 3. H.R. 335, 4. H. Res. 70, 5. H. Res. 82, 6. H. Res. 24, 7. H. Con. Res. 20, 8. H. Res. 59, 9. H. Con. Res. 34, 10. H. Con. Res. 5, 11. H. Res. 90, 12. H. Res. 24, 13. H. Res. 116, and 14. H.J. Res. 20.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, I move to table the appeal of the ruling of the Chair.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, I urge people to vote down this motion to recommit. Mr. McCrery sat in the other day when we had a forum in the Ways and Means Committee and we discussed this bill. We went over it fairly carefully with experts from two sources at least. And, clearly, we are making very modest changes. That was clear from the testimony we had, that these were modest changes to the law. When we make the bigger changes, which we will have to do to give us a real source of money for this, and decide how we are going to allocate it in the most effective way for the country, there will be full hearings in the Ways and Means Committee, and I look forward to having your participation. You have been a real wonderful change in the Ways and Means Committee for us, and we are looking forward to working with you on the Tax Code to make this truly the first step, the first teeny step, and then we are going to make a lot of other big steps.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, can you tell me how much time I have?

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Van Hollen).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek). (Mr. MEEK of Florida asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlelady from Nevada (Ms. Berkley). (Ms. BERKLEY asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, could you tell us the amount of time that we have left?